Third Estate

The Third Estate was a class of the Kingdom of France during the 1700s, representing the middle- and lower-class citizens of France (at times around 96% of the population). It was the bourgeois of the Third Estate that led the French Revolution and the peasants who fought it, but during the revolution, it was the Third Estate that suffered the most.

History
If the First Estate was the church and the Second Estate was the nobility, the Third Estate was "everyone else". It comprised beggars, peasants, the bourgeoisie, notaries, doctors, lawyers, artisans, bankers, and even scholars - who at the time, represented approximately 96% of the population. In a pamphlet entitled What is the Third Estate? (published in 1789), Sieyes wrote: "What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something. Nothing be done without it, everything would be infinitely better without the other two orders".